it before she
spoke.

Her kneeling attitude, and hands outstretched on the counterpane,
suggested an order of ideas that had never been very far from him during
his illness. For Vincent had been wide awake and thinking difficult
thoughts many a time when he lay with his eyes closed, and Katherine had
thought he was asleep.

"I want you to read to me," he said at last.

"What would you like?"

"Well--the New Testament, I think, if it's all the same to you."

She rose from her knees and looked helplessly round the room. There was
a Bible somewhere upstairs, but--

"You'll find one in the drawer there, where my handkerchiefs are."

She looked, rummaging gently among his poor things. She came on a small
muslin pocket-handkerchief, stained with blood, also a loop of black
ribbon of the kind that little girls tie their hair with. Some fine
reddish hairs were still tangled in the knot. At last she found a small
pocket Testament mixed up with some of his neckties. It was old and
worn. Katherine wondered at that, though she could hardly have said why.
Then she saw written on the fly-leaf, in a sprawling girl's hand,
"Vincent, with Audrey's best love," and a date that went back to their
childhood. It was the only present that Audrey had ever made him, and
one that had cost her nothing.

"What part shall I read?"

She was afraid that Vincent would lay the burden of choice on her.

But he did not--he had very decided ideas of his own.

"The eighth of Romans, if you don't mind."

An eagle's feather floated out from between the pages at the eighth of
Romans. It had been picked up on the snows of the Rocky Mountains. If
she had wondered at first, she soon saw why Vincent had chosen that
chapter of all others.

"Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after
the flesh.

"For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the
Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live." Vincent was
dying.

She read on, and as she read she saw behind the edges of the veil that
divides the seen from the unseen.

"For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by
reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope;

"Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of
corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

Her heart beat faster and her breast heaved, but the words lifted her
above pathos and tears, and prepared her for the conso